Mozilla Privacy: Collusion

I worked on the Collusion project — an add-on for Mozilla Firefox Browsers, to produce an interactive visualization of what 3rd party cookies are tracking a user as they browse the web — as part of my Ideas for a Better Internet class, 2011-2012. The class was populated by both Harvard & Stanford law students, as well as computer scientists, educators, designers, and engineers.

Our team — of Alex Moss & myself — worked with engineers & User Experience designers at Mozilla to build a more usable version of Collusion. A Mozilla engineer had made an initial version of the add-on in his spare time, and we liked the idea & wanted to help the project grow into something more powerful & usable.

To see our images of the sketches and of our pitch (comicbook…) either browse through image by image, or you can just scroll down the page. Please try out the add-on & let us know!

We ended up with this add-on, after pitching these various concepts at the Ideas for a Better Internet (i4bi) summit in January 2012. Our team participated in a hackathon at Stanford with the program Code the Change (bringing developers and designers together with non-profits to build products for them).

I also designed the favicon that is used for the add-on, after going through multiple (perhaps, more creepy) iterations…

And here are some of the interfaces of the add-on visualization, that the Mozilla team developed!

Here are some more background slides that I had created for intermediate presentations during the class, when our team was trying to figure out how we would give users more control of their online privacy.